Month: January 2023

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Almost everything you need to know about this piece is in the headline. Except why, of course 🙂 In any case, this essay by Richard Kemick is worth a read: “I can’t remember not wanting a miniature Christmas village. It’s like how I can’t remember when I first realized I have bad posture: some things you never have to learn about yourself but rather just have to accept. I moved out of my parents’ house at seventeen, but my heart has never left—not out of some romantic notion of remembering my roots, but because the idea of renting an apartment with enough room to store my Christmas village borders on lunacy.”

A WWI vet’s unorthodox plan to reach the summit of Mount Everest

One summer day in 1933, a British man named Maurice Wilson clutched the stick of his tiny, open air biplane and watched his fuel gauge dwindle. He had only learned to fly two months earlier, but inexperience was not his biggest problem. His lengthy list of troubles included the angry British officials he had just left behind in Bahrain, the certainty of arrest if he turned left to land in Persia, the roiling waves of the Persian Gulf below, and the increasing likelihood that his fuel would run out before he reached a safe landing. But Wilson pushed on, knuckles white, because he sought a larger goal, a quest that he believed to be his God-given destiny: to crash his plane into Mount Everest.

Continue reading “I sold my wife’s clothes to build a Christmas village”

I think I probably learned more about the leadup to the First World War from a recent edition of Talia Lavin’s “The Sword and the Sandwich” newsletter than I probably ever did in history class. The newsletter is ostensibly about sandwiches, but often veers rather sharply into other topics, and this one was about how history only looks inevitable in hindsight:

“In 1903, more than a decade before a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist student would spark the First World War, a coterie of Serbian Army officers entered the royal bedroom in the old Beaux-Arts palace in Belgrade that was the home of the Obrenović dynasty. Armed with revolvers, they hunted down the 26-year-old king, Alexander I, and his deeply unpopular queen Draginja, flushing them out of their hiding place in a wardrobe and filling them with bullets. The assassins then mutilated the bodies beyond recognition with their sabers, and, in an ecstasy of triumph, hurled the corpses from a second-floor window, onto piles of garden manure. 

The army officers’ leader—known by his nom de guerre “Apis,” for the primordial Egyptian bull-god—was a prominent member of the same Black Hand society that would plot the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand a decade later. The point here is that you never know where in history you are. It may well be that the May Coup organizers—decorated military men full of fanatical zeal—could not have imagined a higher drama than the one they engaged in, throwing a disemboweled king and queen onto the dung-heap that fed the royal roses.

Yet it was the tremblingly nervous teenaged fanatic Gavrilo Princip who stepped onto the footboard of the stalled royal motorcar, and shot Franz Ferdinand and his hapless wife. Princip then tried to kill himself, and failed. Another of the conspirators, eighteen years old, threw a bomb that hit the royal motorcade but caused no injuries, ate a cyanide pill that only made him vomit, and finally jumped into a river. It being summertime, the water was less than a foot deep; he died in prison three years later of tuberculosis.”

In a recent edition of her newsletter “The Sword and the Sandwich,” writer Talia Lavin (who is Jewish) writes about the history behind some Hanukkah traditions such as latkes and “gelt,” the chocolate coins that many children get:

“Take latkes, for example. Delicious, beloved latkes. As ancient as the practice of frying things in oil is, we all know potatoes didn’t arrive in Europe until after the Columbian interchange, and there are a suspicious number of Central and Eastern European analogues to the latke, like Ukrainian deruny or Czech bramboráky. The idea that a bunch of Jews sitting around playing dreidel for a stack of chocolate coins represents an unbroken line of tradition dating back to the Second Temple, when Maccabees slaughtered elephants on the streets of Jerusalem, is a bit of sweet twaddle, the sort of semi-harmless hokum I got served in huge helpings as an Orthodox kid.

It seems particularly apropos that gelt—the ubiquitous gold-foil-wrapped waxy chocolate coins doled out to children and snacked on furtively by adults at this time each year—has a very concrete, quite recent historical origin. Money is among the first things kids get lied to about, even when it isn’t real. Gelt, it turns out, isn’t a beautiful tradition of commemorating the first coins minted by the Hasmonean dynasty, an enduring symbol of their establishment of an independent Jewish kingdom that had shucked off the fetters of imperial rule.

According to scholars and historians , the giving of gelt—which is Yiddish for “money”—dates back no further than perhaps the sixteenth century, when it became traditional to give older yeshiva students, who struggled with penury like all grad students since time began, a little extra to make it through the depths of winter. By the seventeenth century, this evolved into a Chanukah practice of tipping the often-itinerant minor religious figures who helped Jewish communal life function. It took the advent of the nineteenth-century concept of childhood as a precious and vulnerable chapter of life for gelt to become something that one gave to one’s children—and a full-on collision with American consumerism for that money to transmute into chocolate and presents.”

I don’t play a lot of games — especially car-racing games — and I don’t really care that much about NASCAR or Formula One or any of those things. But I was fascinated to read about an incident that happened in a race in November, in which driver Ross Chastain used a technique from a video game, known as “riding the wall” to move ahead by two spots and qualify for the championship (he also set a track record for fastest lap). Here’s a video of it:

In an interview after the race, Chastain was asked how he came up with the maneuver, and he said: “I played a lot of Nascar 2005 on the GameCube with Chad [Chastain, his brother] growing up, and you can get away with it. I never knew if it would actually work … and I just made the choice, and I grabbed fifth gear down the back and full-committed. Once I got against the wall, I basically let go of the wheel and just hoped I didn’t catch the turn four access gate or something crazy.”

Writer Max Read has a great newsletter called Read Max (great name) in which he talks about a variety of things, and in a recent one he asked his friend Dan Nosowitz to write about a tiny phone he became fascinated by recently, called the Unihertz Jelly 2. Dan, he said, has “a compulsion to purchase badly made, strangely designed, possibly quite dangerous gadgets from companies you’ve never heard of.”

“Where has the human-sized smartphone gone? Even normal sized phones are too big now, let alone the specifically large ones. Hands, meanwhile, have remained the same size, at least to the best of my knowledge. My advice to anyone looking for a small phone is to turn away from your conglomerates and your chaebols, and shun the iPhone and the Galaxy. Turn instead to this: The Unihertz Jelly 2.

I need to be clear, up front here, that this is not a traditionally “good” phone, in the sense of “it works consistently to the quality you have come to expect from flagship Samsung and Apple products,” and I am absolutely not a reliable narrator or guide. There is something wrong with my brain which causes me to dislike and distrust competently made and assembled electronics. I see the fact that the iPhone works consistently as a gigantic red flag. There are, in fact, many phones that work well. Too many. “Working well” is boring.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

The Ward, a reading group founded by Tennessee-based author Susan Meachen, largely went dormant after a September 2020 post — supposedly written by her daughter — was shared from her page announcing that she had died by suicide following bullying and harassment from members of the book community. Now, more than two years later, Meachen has decided that she wants her life back and returned to Facebook to reveal that she was never actually dead in the first place. “I debated on how to do this a million times and still not sure if it’s right or not,” Meachen wrote in her back-from-the-dead return to the group on Jan. 2. Those who mourned her are furious.

The truffle industry is a giant scam – not just truffle oil, the whole thing

Matt Babich writes: “Truffle-flavored oil is not made from truffles. What is sold as truffle flavor is 2,4-dithiapentane, an organosulfur compound that is naturally found in truffles. It is practically impossible to extract it from truffles, but it can be extracted from oil. There are several reasons why this is terrible. Synthetic garbage sold as a luxury gourmet item gives customers the idea that truffles have an intense gas-like aroma. It is a scam because it deceives customers; that is, it falsely represents a product that has nothing to do with truffles and puts all restaurateurs in an unfavorable position: if you don’t flavor truffle dishes with added aromas  the guests are used to, they will think you’re being cheap.”

Continue reading “This author’s suicide now appears to be a hoax”

From writer Helena Fitzgerald’s great newsletter Griefbacon (which is the literal translation of a German term meaning “the weight you gain after overeating for emotional reasons”). I’ve only extracted the list here, but you should click through and read all the descriptions as well:

“I hated Twitter because of course I hated Twitter; if you didn’t hate Twitter, you weren’t there. Hating it was the only way to live in it; that was word for love in its language. I hated Twitter, and I still hate Twitter, and an alarming percentage of everything I love or am proud of derives from the time I wasted on that stupid website, complaining about how the website is garbage. Here are some final ways I would describe Twitter.

• A group of drunk girls in the bathroom
• Times Square
• What people who didn’t have friends in middle school think having friends in middle school was like.
• A Denny’s at 2am in a town with a vibrant (derogatory) local theater scene.
• The Titanic but everybody wants to talk about Joan Didion.
• The Titanic but everybody wants to tell you why they don’t count as rich.
• The JFK assassination episode of Mad Men.
• The longest-form Jenny Holzer installation ever.
• Listening to two people have an argument on the street directly underneath your window
• Adderall.
• Sitting at the kids’ table at Thanksgiving when you are supposed to be sitting at the adults’ table.
• Sitting at the adults’ table at Thanksgiving when honestly you should still be sitting at the kids’ table.
• Going into the downstairs bathroom at the home of a relative you actually don’t know very well on Thanksgiving and hiding out there while everybody argues
• The fever dream of a high school freshman who has the flu but has come to school anyway and has fallen asleep in the middle of class.
• The depiction of Hell in noted prestige television series Adventure Time.
• Trying to leave a party where the vibe has soured
• The mythical city of Babel”

In Mumbai, thousands of “dabbawalas” deliver hot lunches to hundreds of thousands of customers throughout the city, and then return the empty dabbas (lunchboxes) the same day. They are a model of efficiency, a decentralized network that functions better than many mechanized or computerized ones, and yet they don’t even use smartphones. Harvard Business Review wrote about the dabbawala system in 2012 (found via the Why Is This Interesting newsletter):

“The 5,000 or so dabbawalas in the city have an astounding service record. Every working day they transport more than 130,000 lunchboxes throughout Mumbai, the world’s fourth-most-populous city. That entails conducting upwards of 260,000 transactions in six hours each day, six days a week, 52 weeks a year (minus holidays), but mistakes are extremely rare.

Amazingly, the dabbawalas—semiliterate workers who largely manage themselves—have achieved that level of performance at very low cost, in an ecofriendly way, without the use of any IT system or even cell phones.

The dabbawala service is legendary for its reliability. Since it was founded, in 1890, it has endured famines, wars, monsoons, Hindu-Muslim riots, and a series of terrorist attacks. It has attracted worldwide attention and visits by Prince Charles, Richard Branson, and employees of Federal Express, a company renowned for its own mastery of logistics.”

Fred Fugen, Vincent “Veush” Cotte, and Aurélien “Bras Noir” Chatard set a new record for terrain-flying in wingsuits. They travelled 7.5 kilometres over Mont Blanc — the highest mountain in the Alps — in just 3 minutes and 5 seconds, after jumping in formation from a helicopter just above the summit.

In 1972, a popular Italian singer named Adriano Celentano released a single called “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” written by him amd performed with his wife Claudia Mori, a singer/actress turned record producer. Both the title of the song and its lyrics are gibberish. Celentano said later that his intention with the song was not to create a humorous novelty song but to explore communication barriers, and to demonstrate how English sounds to people who don’t understand the language proficiently.

“Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did,” Celentano said in an interview with NPR. “So at a certain point, because I like American slang—which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian—I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn’t mean anything.”

Update: Someone let me know that Adriano’s daughter Mina released a remake a few years ago. Adriano even makes an appearance in the video